1st June 2026

1st June 2026


Pray (ACts)


Read (1 Samuel 30 focus v1-6)


Message (Alan Burke) 


I’m going to give you a wee story. It is based on a true story, but I’ve changed some of the details so that you don’t start trying to troll the internet to find out who I’m talking about. There was a minister I came across a few years back who was a competent leader, a wise and loving pastor, and he was an excellent teacher. But circumstances, you could say, conspired against him. His life, in quite a short period of time, became a mess. His mother was killed in a road traffic accident; his father took it very badly and mentally couldn’t cope; his health deteriorated, and this minister had to become his father’s primary carer. His wife had a miscarriage not long after, and it all became too much for him. Initially, he went off on stress and later decided to resign and left the ministry, stopped going to worship, cut himself off from many people. The family was suffering, his father, his wife, and children, and him. A number of years later, I heard the news that he was back preaching. He moved to a new area; the local minister called every week. For the first number of months, he was turned away but persisted, and through time, he found strength in the LORD and is now back as a minister of a congregation. Praise the LORD. 


We focus on David once more, and he’s just been sent away by the Philistine Commanders. He is returning to Ziklag, unbeknownst to him. While he was away with his men, the Amalkites have come. They have plundered Ziklag and burnt it to the ground. David had gone from one crisis to another within days. Yet the LORD continued to be at work. David here hits his own crisis point. David had been in a lot of ways acting no differently than Saul; he’d lied and deceived; he acted sinfully in what had unfolded. He and his men have been away a while from their families; they are tired and dejected. But you can imagine the closer they are getting to home, the more they are thinking about their wives, families, getting to see their faces again, getting into their own beds, and then when they arrive, Ziklag has been burned; all who were there have been taken off in slavery, all their wives, sons, and daughters. In that moment, their lives reached a new low. In that moment, his life was at rock bottom, his heart is grieving, he has wept until he had no strength left to weep. 


Things were about to get worse as his men turned on him, wanting to stone him. They were filled with bitterness because they had lost everything. David’s men had lost everything. Their loved ones had been taken. They had been taken into slavery. The anger and emotion of his men was beginning to boil over. David is the scapegoat. But in this, we see David, found strength in the LORD. How did he find strength here in the midst of losing everything, his men wanting to stone him? It was that David recalled to his mind all the wonderful promises of God that he had been given, and the ultimate victory he knew would be the LORD’s. In his time of crisis, he looked to the LORD and his word and found strength. Brother and sister, I don’t know what you’re facing. I don’t know if you’re going through the darkest valley, if you have lost all the colour in life and it is only darkness and you’re simply putting on a face, or you’re struggling with assurance of God’s love, of his presence, or something else. I know though, that whatever it is, what you need is like David, is to recall the wonderful promise of God, to be strengthened by his word. 


The LORD doesn’t promise us come to faith in Jesus and your life will be rosy, you’ll be spared from pain, heartbreak, everything will be alright, no, while some false teachers will promise that to you if you trust in Jesus in this life we will still experience much sorrow, for we live under the curse, but we look to a day that that curse will be no more through the hope we have in Jesus the Christ (Rev 22:3). Even when we face times of crisis, we can know that the LORD is sovereignly at work, that he will have the ultimate victory. 


Pray (acTS)


Sing


WSC
Q82 Is any man able perfectly to keep the commandments of God?
A. No mere man since the fall is able in this life perfectly to keep the commandments of God, but doth daily break them in thought, word, and deed.
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